The Truth About Alice (4 page)

I rolled over onto my stomach and sank my face into the football bedspread. It smelled like sweat and Tide. Brandon was saying something else about Alice Franklin's tits.

Sometimes I wonder if I hadn't put the idea of her into Brandon's head, everything that happened wouldn't have happened. Because sometimes when Brandon got an idea into his head, it was like trying to sack him when he was about to throw a touchdown pass. What I mean is, it was impossible.

But that afternoon in Brandon's bedroom lying face down with my head sort of spinning, I didn't know that one day I would wonder what if. All I knew that afternoon was that I was drunk and I was Brandon Fitzsimmons's best friend and we were some of the best football players Healy had ever seen, and that night me and him were going to go to Elaine O'Dea's party.

Kurt

To state the blatantly obvious, I wasn't invited to Elaine O'Dea's party.

To tell you the truth, I didn't even know there was a party at Elaine O'Dea's, although I've always been aware that there are parties and football games and other social events going on around me. I've just never been invited to them, and even if I were to be invited, I wouldn't attend. I see no need in taking part in forced adolescent social rituals that would do nothing but stir up emotions of dread for all involved. I would dread having to interact at such an event, and I know they would dread to see me show up at the door.

In an effort to be completely fair, I suppose it's not technically true that I've never been invited. In elementary school, I was invited. That was back when all of us were students at Jefferson Elementary, and our quirks and strange rough edges hadn't fully formed yet. We were just kids, and we all got along to a certain degree. What were parties back then anyway other than running around in the backyard and eating hot dogs off the grill? Besides, I think Brandon Fitzsimmons's parents and Elaine O'Dea's parents and all the other parents felt sorry for me. I was the orphan from Chicago.

Yes, it's true. It sounds Charles Dickensesque, but I'm an honest to God orphan and have been since the age of five. My parents were driving the Dan Ryan Expressway in a bad storm one Saturday evening, and the next day I was an orphan, shipped off to Healy to live with my dad's mom.

I have vague memories of my parents and Chicago. I remember I had plastic cereal bowls in every color of the rainbow, and I remember I liked to curl into my dad's armpit to watch PBS children's programming, and I remember when I hugged my mom she smelled of soap.

But then came Healy and the sad cluckety clucks from my grandmother's friends whenever we ran into them at the Kroger and the licensed clinical social worker who was always asking me to draw my feelings with crayons. Accelerate through time and I'm a junior in high school, and it's strange to think I ever lived anywhere else but here, with its oppressive summer heat and small town drama.

I don't exactly fit into the milieu that is Healy life. Why not? First, I've been told I'm sort of a genius. I even take online classes through the university nearby because some of the high school coursework isn't challenging enough for me. I'll admit to trying to read in the shower and using my free time to think about black holes folding in on themselves, but honestly, it's not like I
tried
to be a genius. I'm not even sure I am a genius, despite what the college counselor tells me. Maybe I'm just a genius by Healy standards.

Secondly, I do not play sports nor do I have an interest in sports at all.

Lastly, unlike my fellow citizens, I have the ability to recognize that Healy is simply an extremely small place in the middle of a very large place called the United States, and that the United States is itself also just a small place in the middle of an even larger place called the world, and that makes much of what is discussed in and around Healy inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

So why don't I mind living here? First, everyone leaves me alone. Which is to say they ignore me. Which is not as bad as it sounds. To be honest, it's really rather nice to be afforded such freedom of time and of space to read, to think and study, and to be left in peace. When I sit by myself in the cafeteria rereading
The Hobbit
for the thirteenth time just because I want to, I don't look out onto the sea of faces and wish I wasn't alone. I simply acknowledge the sea exists and go back to
The Hobbit
. It isn't difficult for me.

Secondly, I haven't minded living in Healy because my grandmother is a loving and caring woman who has raised me with affection and compassion.

Lastly, Alice Franklin lives here.

Alice Franklin with the raspberry lips and the bad reputation and the faraway eyes. Alice Franklin with the short hair not like any other girl's and the gloriously loud laugh and the body that curves like an alpha wave. Alice Alice Alice Alice Franklin.

Oh, yes, I am a genius, but I am still a man. A man who lives in Healy. And Alice Franklin lives in Healy, which makes Healy worth living in.

Before Elaine O'Dea's party, I watched Alice Franklin from a very distant vantage point. I made mental notes. Not because I thought I would ever be able to achieve any sort of romantic relationship with her, but because taking note of the things she said and did made me feel like I knew her better, and this provided me with more fodder for my daydreams of walking with Alice Franklin, of kissing Alice Franklin, of holding Alice Franklin's alpha waves close to my body.

Things I Noticed About Alice Franklin Before Elaine O'Dea's Party

• Once when she was walking down the Foreign Language hall and a very skinny freshman boy dropped all of his books and some senior kicked them, Alice Franklin stopped and knelt down in her lime-colored pencil skirt and scooped them up in her arms and handed them to this boy and smiled at him. I remember catching a glimpse of her knees as she knelt down. They were like two peach-flavored candies. She has tremendous knees.

• She doodled constantly in class. Flowers, apple pies, lizards, clocks, cats. Every margin of every notebook was covered. But she could doodle and still listen because sometimes she would be in the middle of a doodle of, say, a fish swimming in a stream, and she would stretch out her hand and ask a question.

• At lunch, she always ate the same thing every single day: tuna salad sandwich, pretzels, apple, lemonade.

• On the first day of tenth grade in Ms. Galanter's English class, when we had to make a list of our favorite things, I managed to glimpse and memorize the following:
favorite book—
The Outsiders
, favorite smell—fresh cut grass, favorite sound—the French language, favorite day of the week—Saturday, favorite band—The Beatles.

• Also during tenth grade I found her in the library after school trying to finish up homework for Geometry. She was leaning over her notebook and chewing the end of her pencil and writing and erasing and writing and erasing. I walked by and somewhere deep inside of my soul I found the temerity to ask her if she needed help. She said, “Well, do you have a sec?” I sat next to her. She smelled of vanilla. Her perfect cleavage was peeking out of a pink top. I had to struggle to explain the problem and ended up just doing it for her. When I was done, she said, “Thanks, Kurt.” All the way home that afternoon I was smiling to myself because Alice Franklin called me by my name. Admittedly, there are only 150 people in our class, so everyone knows everyone else's name. But still, it was nice to hear my name uttered by her voice.

Even a recluse like me learned of the events that allegedly occurred at Elaine O'Dea's party, and even a recluse like me could have seen the slow shift in Alice Franklin's behavior and in the behavior of those she was normally surrounded by. The girls she sat with in the cafeteria have drifted away, one by one. There's quite an enormous difference between a person like me, who enjoys eating alone, and a person like Alice Franklin, who has had isolation placed upon her as a mark of shame. Lately, Alice Franklin doesn't even eat in the cafeteria anymore.

Then Brandon Fitzsimmons died, not that long ago, and people have been claiming that Alice caused the accident by sending him inappropriate texts. Lately, it seems Alice has become magnetic for all sorts of negative attention. She's started coming to school dressed in a bulky sweatshirt. You can't see her perfect cleavage anymore. She's taken to wearing the hood up, even in the hallways. It's like she wants to disappear.

Yesterday, after the final bell, I was walking past the football stadium bleachers behind the school, and I saw Alice sitting there. Her face looked tear-stained.

At that moment, it seemed like the opportunity I had been looking for. To talk to her. To tell her what I knew. Because—and this was shocking—I know something about Alice. I know something—a fact, a truth—that might perhaps bring her relief but at the same time might perhaps only bring her more pain. I formed the words in my mouth, rolling my tongue over them, attempting multiple times to push them out through my lips. How idiotic I must have seemed just standing there, looking at her, saying nothing. Practicing words.

Finally, Alice noticed me.

“What the hell do you want?” she snapped. This time, she didn't call me Kurt.

“I…” I said, opening and closing my mouth. How desperately I wanted to tell her what I knew. How much I wanted to share the information I had that no one else at Healy High had a claim on but me.

“Seriously, what the hell?” she said, standing up and shoving her hands into the pockets of her hooded sweatshirt. She stomped off down the bleachers. “I'm not a sideshow attraction.”

And she wasn't. Not to me.

She was the main attraction.

But I had no way to tell her that.

Kelsie

We moved here from Michigan because my dad got a job working for his uncle as an electrician. Also, Jesus wanted us to come here. At least according to my mother, who is personal, best friends with Jesus Christ. Jesus has to okay everything with my mother before she does it. I guess he even okayed The Really Awful Stuff that happened to me last summer. But I don't know, because my mom and I have never talked about it since.

Anyway, before we left Flint to come here, I made a promise to myself. When I got to Healy, I wasn't going to sit by myself in the cafeteria reading a book and I wasn't going to sit in the front row in class answering all the questions just because I could. I was going to learn how to wear eyeliner and I was going to start figuring out what colors looked right with other colors and I was going to force my mother to let me start shaving my legs even if Jesus said I shouldn't. I wasn't going to spend my weekends making shoebox dioramas by myself for fun and I was going to start talking to people who weren't my parents and I wasn't going to be the same lame Kelsie Sanders that I'd been all of my fourteen-year-old life.

I spent my last summer in Flint working so hard. Just like I'd once worked on my shoebox dioramas, I spent those weeks reading the magazines and watching the televisions shows that all the girls in my class talked about, trying to get as much information as I could about the right way to behave. I babysat for snotty Jerry Baker next door and saved up all my money for the right clothes and the right makeup, and when my mom told me Christian girls didn't wear skinny jeans, I did it anyway.

“You're new, right?” Alice Franklin said to me that first day of ninth grade as I sat in the back row of Mrs. Hennesey's homeroom.

“Yeah,” I said, eyeing her raspberry lipstick and trying really hard not to look impressed. My mother might not have noticed my shaved legs, but she sure wasn't going to let me out of the house with raspberry lipstick on.

“Well, we're all new to high school, right?” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “Even if most of us have lived here for a bajillion years.” She said
bajillion
like the word tasted like rotten eggs.

“Yeah,” I answered, already picturing myself alone in the cafeteria since I could only come up with one-word answers.

“See that boy over there?” Alice said suddenly, pointing to a boy with short blond hair and a Texas Longhorns T-shirt on.

“Yeah?”

“Stay away from him. His name is Kyle Walker. We went out in middle school, and he's a
total
asshole.”

Back then I never swore, not even privately in my head, and I know I started blushing.

Just then a pretty cute guy sitting next to us turned and asked Alice if she was free that weekend and wanted to hang out. And just at the moment when I knew I would never be cool enough for this girl, Alice said in her most bored voice possible, “Um, I'm free every weekend. It's in the Constitution.”

Before I could tell myself to
shut up, stupid!
I exclaimed, “Oh my God, do you know
Grease 2
? That's a line from
Grease 2
!”

That's how we became friends. We both liked to watch really stupid musicals like
Xanadu
, and
Can't Stop the Music
, and even
Paint Your Wagon
, and we both liked to eat frosting straight from the can, and we both thought Elaine O'Dea acted way cuter than she actually was. When she came over to my house for the first time, she didn't seem to be weirded out by the Smile! Jesus Loves You! pencils in the kitchen by the to-do list or the Bible Stories Bingo game on the coffee table. She was just nice about it, and during our third sleepover after we'd watched
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
and we were buried in our sleeping bags and it was totally dark and the only sound was the air conditioner cycling on and off—when I chose that second to tell Alice Franklin that back in Flint I'd never had anyone over for a sleepover—Alice didn't laugh.

“I'm glad you had me over,” she said. “I'm glad we're friends.”